Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse (1940)
1940 · Ephemeral film · 3 min · dir. Barney Elliott
- Documentary
Synopsis
The collapse of the bridge was recorded on film by Barney Elliott, owner of a local camera shop. The film shows Leonard Coatsworth leaving the bridge after exiting his car. In 1998, The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. This footage is still shown to engineering, architecture, and physics students as a cautionary tale. Elliott's original film of the construction and collapse of the bridge was shot at 16 frames a second, on 16mm Kodachrome film, but most copies in circulation are in black and white because newsreels of the day copied the film onto 35 mm black-and-white stock (not to mention, often showed the film at the wrong speed).
Synopsis from OMDb
Details
- Director
- Barney Elliott
- Studio
- The Camera Shop, Tacoma
- Released
- 1940-12-31
- Awards
- 1 win
- Running time
- 3 minutes
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Prelinger Archives
Cast & crew
- Barney Elliott Director
- Frederick Burt Farquharson
Reviews on the Internet Archive
★★★★★ · Tacoma bridge wobbles, will fall down! · Spuzz · 2012-06-07
Another great "Filling in the blanks" piece of footage as we see the infamous "wobbling bridge" footage but we see how that bridge was built, the opening ceremony and the aftermath! The Tacoma bridge is built, with some amazing and exciting footage of men dangling from cages to put the beast together, after a (of course) pompous bridge opening ceremony, Disaster strikes, as the bridge starts weaving to and fro, it's still pretty incredible to see such footage today. Soon, all of this bending causes the whole thing to fall apart and then we see some start remnants of what could have been.…
★★★★★ · A Lesson In Resonance · JayKay49 · 2012-11-13
The winds weren't really all that fiercely high (by Pacific Coast standards) but the bridge began to undulate just at its resonant pitch and of course, as you can see it built on its own wobble frequency and boom...down she went. A classic episode in modern engineering. I sometimes wonder if that could happen to almost any suspension bridge with wind gusts of the right period, from the right direction.